FROM SCYLLA TO CHARYBDIS

Successful journalistic writing of the present time must be brief and to the point if it is to command any readers. The Daily Emerald of the University of Oregon in order to comply with this rule has abolished its editorial column, substituting letters from the student body on subjects of general university interest. As a result, any excess verbiage with which the editorial writers might have loaded the paper has been replaced by concise remarks of the individual student.

Verbosity has been disposed of at the expense of unity. The objection that editorials are too wordy may be founded on actual fact, but they are, in most cases, at least an attempt to crystallize the general consensus of opinion; they try to be rather the expression of the student body than of the writer. Whether they are read or not, they are a criterion of student opinion that is accepted by the world at large. If a multiplicity of individual ideas is to be substituted for the digest offered by the editor, the force of the single expression will be lost.

Occasional printing of correspondents opinion is a stimulus to editorial enterprise, but in omitting all comment, the newspaper forfeits much of its power to preserve any unity of principle. The function of the paper is that of the chairman in a debate, and it is this function which is surrendered with the disappearance of the writes editorial.